Krans gathered all the information he could from Mahood’s descriptions. He’d searched topographic maps and the land itself, looking for scars on the landscape, or roads that seemed to lead nowhere.
The Los Angeles Times put reports of the covered-up version of the crash four miles southeast of a Union Pacific Railroad site called Leith the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Las Vegas Sun plotted it four miles to Leith’s southwest. It had taken him more than two years, 20 trips, and $6,000 to replace a sunk truck. In 1997, Mahood spun a tale of searching for-and finding-a long-lost A-12 crash site. He started reading Bluefire, a blog run by a guy named Tom Mahood. He felt lost and listless, and spent hours killing time between classes in the school’s computer lab, largely sucked into websites about Area 51, where he had recently made a road trip. Krans’s employer, a General Motors dealership, had sent him to its Automotive Service Educational Program. His own journey into such journeying began just months after his father passed away. Meanwhile, Krans devoured films like Indiana Jones and The Goonies-tales of explorers and treasure-hunters. Krans’s favorite was the SR-71 Blackbird, a Cylon-ship of a craft, and the follow-on to the A-12 he’d one day search out. Krans’s interest in aviation goes back to the 1980s, when his dad, a machinist fascinated by engineering and innovative planes, would sometimes bring home jet models. Krans, once a frequent poster on the urbex forum UER.ca, has always favored defense sites, beginning with empty missile silos and ghostly military installations in his early 20s. They’ve uncovered spots others likely never knew about, like the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane and the rainwater drains under Sydney. They like to go places that used to be something else, to someone else. The community-small and loose but dedicated, lurking and sharing on forums and blogs-is populated by photographers and amateur historians. Urbexers scavenger-hunt for sites and then crawl through closed tunnels, scour old buildings, flashlight around finished mines, and trek through old military bases. It’s the art of adventuring in and around abandoned or hidden structures, urban and otherwise. Krans had a pastime that gave him the skills to do something about it: urban exploring, sometimes called “urbex” by the initiated. “I felt that we needed to do something,” he says, “because nobody knows who the hell Walt is.” But in the late 1990s, an explorer named Jeremy Krans began what would become a decades-long quest to uncover it all, and ultimately to make Ray’s once-classified life public. For years, Ray’s crash sites remained largely hidden from the public.
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